Clinton Seeks Better Ties With South Africa

August 9, 2009|By Robyn Dixon Tribune Newspapers

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — Relations between the United States and South Africa have been so rocky in recent years that former U.S. Ambassador Eric Bost used to charge that he couldn't get Cabinet ministers to return his calls.

With South Africa pulling in the opposite direction under former President Thabo Mbeki on issues such as how to deal with Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and the move to arrest Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir on war crimes charges, the Bush administration found itself stymied.

But with two new leaders in power, U.S. President Barack Obama and South African President Jacob Zuma, the United States sees a chance to remake relations.

On Saturday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took the first steps toward putting the relationship with sub-Saharan Africa's most powerful economy back on the rails, meeting with Zuma in the east coast city of Durban.

"In both countries there are two new administrations which are taking that relationship a level higher. That is what we are trying to do," Zuma said after meeting Clinton.

Clinton pressed for the South African leader to take a strong leadership role on Zimbabwe, where a power-sharing deal signed last year is being undermined by hard-liners from Mugabe's ZANU-PF party.

With a string of democratic setbacks in Africa from Nigeria to Kenya, she also urged South Africa to play a more active role in pressing for democracy, transparency and good governance across the continent.

Underscoring the leadership role the United States hopes Zuma will take in Africa, Clinton indicated that their talks covered the three major crises on the continent: Zimbabwe; Somalia, where a fragile government is fighting an Islamic insurgency; and Sudan, whose government is implicated in the large-scale killings and displacement of tribespeople in Darfur.

"My visit to South Africa was to ensure that their expectations of the betterment of the world are met," said Clinton, who is on a seven-nation tour of Africa.

At a meeting with South African business leaders Friday, Clinton said that as the continent's economic powerhouse, South Africa was well-placed to tout the benefits of democracy and the rule of law across Africa.

Clinton's main theme throughout her visit is increasing trade instead of aid in Africa.

But analysts say U.S. strategic priorities in Africa remain as they were under the Bush administration: access to oil; competition for resources with China, which has aggressively wooed African leaders in recent years; and combating terrorist movements in northern Africa.

The main departure of the Obama administration, analysts say, is the Global Food Initiative announced last month at the Group of 8 meeting of industrialized nations in Rome, designed to pump billions of dollars into developing agriculture in poor nations to reduce hunger, poverty and reliance on food aid.

Gerald LeMelle, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based analytical organization Africa Action, said the food initiative would be of limited assistance to reducing poverty in Africa unless Europe and America stopped propping up their own farmers and opened their markets to African produce.

"The G-8 countries subsidize their farmers to the tune of $785 billion a year," he said. "They can flood Africa with cheap agricultural products and completely undermine African farmers."